The RPS Bargain Bucket: 14 Months

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It is a special weekend this weekend. Today is the day I realised that I let the one year anniversary of the Bargain Bucket pass without mention. Just over two months ago I should have mentioned it, but it completely slipped my mind. So this is it, the first anniversary and a bit of the bargain bucket. I’ll secure a bottle of cheap wine, you get the low grade sausage rolls, and we’ll have a party. Remember to go to SavyGamer dot co dot you kay for more constantly updated cheap games.Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 + Chaos Rising – £19.99/€27.49/$19.99
A much better deal for those of you residing in North America, there’s a surprise. There is a sneaky trick here that might be of use, since on their own DOW2 costs £9.99/€14.99/$14.99 and Chaos Rising costs £14.99/€14.99/$14.99. If you have one person that want’s DOW2, and one that already has DOW2, but wants Chaos Rising, it is cheaper for the second person to buy DOW2: Gold for £19.99/€27.49/$19.99, gift the spare copy of DOW2 to the first person, and then split the cost. It’s a shame that the ability to gift a spare license here is the exception to the rule. In most bundles the additional license you purchase just dissolves. RPS coverage here, demo here.

The Orange Box – £11.89/€20.99/$20.99
Valve’s super duper collection has always been one of the best deals in PC gaming, even more so when they decide to lop and extra 30% off. This additional discount coincides with Half-life 2, Episode 1 and Episode 2 joining Portal in being released for those white computers that cost lots of money, and them adding silly achievements, extra pretties, and Xbox three hundred and sixty controller support to HL2 and Episode 1 (Episode 2 already had them all). Team Fortress 2 is on the way to Mac soon. I imagine that there is not a single person reading this that hasn’t already played HL2, but if your just interested in the continuing adventures of Gordon Freeman, then HL2, Episode 1 and Episode 2 have been discounted individually too. Considering that they have had a promotion for Portal and now Half-Life 2 when the Mac versions launched, I think we can expect similar promotions for Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead 1 + 2 when they get released for Mac too. RPS coverage here. In case you weren’t sure, it is a good game.

Disciples & Jagged Alliance promo
Over at GOG, for £3.45/€4.07/$4.99 a pop, you can get the following:
Disciples: Sacred Lands,
Disciples 2: Gold,
Jagged Alliance,
Jagged Alliance 2
Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games
Which one is the Goodest Old Game?

Assassin’s Creed – £4.97/€7.48/$7.48 – £2.48/€3.74/$3.74
Another loyalty discount. Depending on how much money you’ve given them in the past, you get somewhere between 50% and 75% off. It comes with Tages DRM, and it’s a fairly stupid game. It’s pretty, no matter what other criticisms are fair to make of it, it is definitely a very good looking game. The wall climbing animation is fantastic, and the huge city is of the “you can go anywhere that you can see” variety. Still, it is shallow as they come. You can disengage your brain for almost the entirety of the game. There’s lots of standing around waiting for people to say a bunch of words, and whilst in terms of performance the game runs well, the menus are very consoley. Don’t forget if you want to finish the story on the PC, you’ll have to grapple with Ubisoft’s horrible horrible broken online services platform DRM, or crack it. The story is a load of bollocks anyway, and I’m not convinced the developers actually know what is actually going on. I suppose I am being a little down on it, that is really cheap, and it is definitely pretty, and you do get to stab people. Maybe give it a whirl, but don’t get your hopes up that it will play like this trailer made me imagine it would.

Deal of the weekSins of a solar empire – £2.76/€3.25/$3.99
I’ve not played this one yet, but I always thought that the name was phonetically delicious. It just rolls of the tongue. Jim says: “Sins is just simplistic enough for me to play it as a bulky strategic shooter – the way I like my RTS games – but also complex enough for you to feel like an entire afternoon plunged into its abyss isn’t wasted. I’m sure that when the Great Computer In The Sky judges me after my death it will criticise millions of the seconds I spent playing lesser games, but I think he’ll be okay with Sins.” RPS coverage here, demo here.

They issued those coupons for this weekend, but now they have just bumped the prices of all of those games up. When I checked them last night they were all at significantly lower prices (and the prices I quoted were correct when the coupons were applied).

That’s pretty damn horrible. I’ll have a chat to my contact at the hut on Monday and call them out on their dishonesty.

Jagged Alliance 2 is definitely the goodest Good Old Game in that promo.

Spent many hours with the vanilla version, and am now playing through with the 1.13 mod.

Haven’t seen anything similar that was anywhere near as good as it. Bit similar to X-Com in that regard, many have tried to make similar games but have failed on some level to capture the brilliance of the earlier games.

I simply blocked the game via my firewall. Ubisoft were definitely doing something dodgy there with a single player game constantly trying to connect to the internet, and lagging it out while doing so.

I read it as if you want to finish the *series* on PC – ie play the later games on your personal computer – you’ll need to have at Ubi’s mega-zilla-DRM, rather than that you need to worry about it for this game.

Yes, and while I too would like to see the English world revert to Victorian vernacular; it does not really say much for your intellectual maturity to be calling people out on a pc gaming website for using contemporary parlance. Really, My lords and ladies, get off your high horse(s).

You could individually buy everything in that bundle from play.com for a combined cost of around £27 anyway it would seem, Conviction being the (naturally) only remotely expensive one of the lot. Presumably this is true of other retailers.

Alternatively, pickup Chaos Theory for under £5 as the only one especially worth paying for.

1. Price in one chosen standard currency, likely USD, and then have the other prices just be a realtime conversion from this, using current exchange rates. This is what Impulse and GOG do, and what Steam and GamersGate used to do. The problem with this is that it’s not good to have prices changing every day. It’s not good for a customer to see ever changing prices. You can’t do psychological pricing either, and more importantly, publishers can’t practise price discrimination. They can’t charge different customers different prices just because they are in different countries. You also can’t include taxes like VAT in the quoted price.

2. Set a price for each currency. Look at the exchange rate now, and then choose a price that is roughly (and different publishers use different definitions of roughly) the same for each region, and charge that. This means that the publisher has to absorb the impact of currency fluctuations. This is what Steam, D2D, and GamersGate do. The problem with this is that publishers will abuse this. Lots of publishers just use this as a way to charge people more because they can.

And in any case, I do have an option 3. Offer us three currents but let us choose in which one we pay. In other words, no “you can not buy this game in your country”. If I want to pay in pounds, let me pay in pounds.

And your point 1 doesn’t explain why we have 3 euro tiers. That has nothing to do with exchangement rates.

I’ve played it for a bit, but I don’t own it. You’ll enjoy it if you like 4x/ rts games. Be warned though, it has no plot to speak of – the scenarios are all sandbox or abstracted scenarios in a similar mold to gal civ 2.
So, if a structured campaign with a narrative is something you need to get stuck into a game, it might not grab you. It’s definitely a great game, just not for everyone.

Incidentally, I haven’t really been keeping an eye on any of the expansions I know have come out, so does anyone know if any of that has changed – does it have a campaign these days ?

Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations are two halves of the same Stardock Entertainment coin. One is an RTS and one is turn-based; one has detailed tactical controls and a more abstract big-picture, the other has the opposite

I’d put forward Sword of the Stars by Paradox as a hybrid of the two, with turn based play on a galactic map, but also some limited tactical control in battles.

All three games are pretty awesome, but they all require a big time commitment. Still, if you’ve got some spare time and a decent attention span, you can’t go wrong!

I find the gal civ’s lack of combat, research and logistical depth a death blow to my enjoyment of what is constrained to a single player experience which is only challenge worthy when the ai cheat, or team up on you.

Which is fair, but obviously it’s a matter of taste. I find the colony management, empire building, and alternative routes to victory very gratifying, and have generally found the AI to present a solid challenge. Outside the setting GC2 and SotS are about as far on opposite ends of their own subgenre as they could possible be, but I love ’em both.

Sins may be interesting if you like story-free, slow moving RTSes set in space – Sins being about the only member of that category, actually. It’s not actually a 4X in any meaningful way and for someone like me who doesn’t enjoy skirmishes in RTSes, much less multiplayer, it’s pretty much wasted money.

Sins is a good laugh, but I found it got old fast (I never upgraded to the expansion) If you like both rts and 4x you should give it a bash, as it bridges the gap somewhat (but leans toward rts-ish) Equally GalCiv is great but ultimately limited, and in no way satisfy’s my lust to be a galactic overlord/utter space-bastard.
I still havent bought Distant World (partially due to the fact that Matrix keeps refusing my payment – for some abstract reason) but im GAGGING for a decent sci-fi 4x that gives me the freedom and tools to create what I want to create.

Also i want Dominions 4 whith a crazy diplomacy system and a dynamic campaign. I will die unfulfilled.

Holy shit Pax Imperia is one of my favourite games ever. Was it ’97 when it came out? Holy goddamn. I impulse-bought a bargain bin copy a couple years later. My nine year old self really sucked at it, but it was totally awesome anyways. I still play that thing.

@The Telemetrics of Robert Francis Bailey
Long handle, man… It wasn’t so much developed by blizzard as temporarily owned by blizzard – published by THQ and developed by Heliotrope, if I recall. Man, what ever happened to heliotrope, anyway? Good luck finding a copy…

Jagged Alliance 2 is superb, I highly reccomend it if you even remotely like turn based squad level strategy. The 1.13 patch and never ending updates just add to that, although can be a bit confusing if you don’t read into it carefully and edit a few things to suit your tastes.

For the Jagged Alliance games, there’s no point in getting any of them except Jagged Alliance 2 vanilla (no Unfinished Business/Wildfire), as that’s all you need to run the 1.13 community patch (which adds all the good stuff from the expansions anyway).

Ah Sins, why does everyone like you so much? You’re too shallow to be a good 4X and too slow and simplistic to be a good RTS (and that’s from someone that prefers his RTS’s slow and thoughtful). Sure, you’re pretty and the scale of it all is impressive, but all you’ve really got going for you is looks. Still, at that price it’s not like it matters, most people will spend a few hours just watching that cool hyperspace animation.

It’s worth noting that Sins has two DLC’s, $10 apiece. One of them is a reasonably cool-looking expansion of defensive options that adds space stations and such. The other is a much-needed patch for the horribly broken vanilla diplomacy system, which I honestly think they have a lot of nerve charging for.

I think of sins as a nice platform to practise micro management. You can get by without so much as a hotkey but tanking, flanking and (banking?) managing skirmishes can be quite deep. Especially when carriers and fighters/bombers are involved. Indeed a fighter fleet is king against all except for a few capital ships and super cheap and otherwise useless flak ships.

Now that’s intriguing. Sins is very much in the “all the ships stop moving, point at each other, and shoot” school of space combat. In the past, moving anything from that configuration seemed to be disadvantageous, because whole moving many of them don’t fire (or don’t fire accurately) so you’re just opening yourself up to unreturned enemy fire. Has that changed? Exterior of using the special abilities on your heroes (oh, sorry, capital ships) what more is there, really? Flanking? I’ve never seen any clear evidence that ships are weaker from the sides or the like. Enlighten me.

Carriers are always/pretty much unarmed but their guns are the craft they launch. So carriers can run away and still pose a threat. And capital ships recharging skills allow them to fight guerilla combat.

Flanking is done on a larger scale, use a force to draw someone out them slam against their pink fleshy bits.

Microing the fire area of you units can massively blunt things like missile rushes.

They actually still do that for Canada. I tend to buy steam games, on sale, when the Canadian dollar is high. It fluctuated very high recently, and I managed to get a 20 dollar US game for 20.10 CDN, or something.

I love Jagged Alliance 2, but it pisses me off so much how you can’t really tell what field of view your guys have until the dreaded red crosshairs shows up; and even then, half the time you have no idea what’s the obstruction and how you can clear it..

It’s the kind of game that’s GOT to be in 3D. That’s why I play silent storm instead, even though it’s less good.

Yo, sins of a solar empire, galactic civilizations, and sword of the stars are all great games, and I’ll let you finish arguing about them… But, clearly, we can all agree: Ascendancy was the greatest empire-in-space strategy game of all time. OF ALL TIME!

So the general consensus is that, if I wanted to try a Jagged Alliance game, I would be stupid to buy the first one, as I had planned, and should just buy the sequel? There’s no plot or anything that would make starting with the second one uncool?

I found the second to be so much better in every way to the first that I can think of no reason to play the first. Really.

It doesn’t help that, while both games are fearsomely hard, the first was completely unfair as well, at least at the beginning – you pretty much had to win about ten pitched battles in a row without anyone even getting injured, or you’d run out of money and lose the game. I liked it, but it was far too frustrating and felt completely rigged.

The second one is very tough indeed, and you do have to win several battles in succession, but there’s not so much time pressure, and you can pick up some weapons that can even the odds quite soon after starting. I’ve just had to cut myself off and delete another sentence before I start gushing, but it bears repeating that the second effectively makes the first one obsolete.

Even better, you actually get to see the reaction to the flowers. The ‘meanwhile…’ cutscenes in Jagged Alliance 2 are great, and really hammer home that this may be a realistic tactical game, but the characters are as cartoonish as you can get.

You know, if DoW2 required Steam and used Steam’s multiplayer platform that would be one thing, but what the hell is the sense in requiring Steam and then also requiring GfWL for multiplayer? PICK ONE, and when you do so pick Steam because it has its faults, but it doesn’t suck anywhere near as hard as GfWL on balance.

Yes, this pay what you want bundle is entirely legit, and the money goes directly to the developers. Indie devs need all the funds they can get, and since you can pay a mere dollar (or whatever) for these, there’s no real reason not do.

If anyone cares (I did) Independance War Deluxe is on GoG, and has been for a ickle while now. It might just be me, but I think $5.99 for I War and the expansion might count for the bargain bit here.

Sadly, I have been having issues with it, and once they were sorted a different set cropped up, but the majority of users seem to be finding it works fine and I really do recomend it. Some of the best missions and space-based combat there is, and it is different enough from Freespace to say that. By which I mean the flight mechanics, which are the old newtonian physics from Frontier, coupled with the fact you are piloting a capital ship instead of a fighter, leads to some fantastic engagements.

The mission structure is fantastic, each one being a small story that isn’t always solved via the “Turn up, blast things, end mission” approach*. Several of the missions have alternate endings which can set you off down different paths – the first time I ever played it I didn’t realise what was going on and signed up with the bad guys by mistake. They were very convincing, mind.

* Which is why I got angry that the news article claiming it had been released included the line “One of our testers said it was Mechwarrior – in space!”, but not as much as when they claimed Aquanox was “like Freespace, only underwater!”**

Independence War seems to work better using a different glide wrapper (dgVoodoo) than the one GOG supplied with the game, with the big plus that you can then run the 3D part of the game at very high resolution which makes the game look much better on modern machines, and the screen scales properly too. Fixed a problem with movies blurring for me also.
Some users seem to have problems with it though, so your mileage may vary.
It’s an absolute miracle they’ve got it working as well as they have though. The game was almost impossible to get working on Windows 7 or XP previously.
There seems to be a bit of a compatibility gap in PC gaming. DOS games work via DOSbox, and later games designed for DirectX 7 and above generally work well, but anything designed for Windows 95/98 with software rendering or using graphics API’s like 3Dfx Glide have massive problems with modern machines.